Thursday, August 16, 2007

August: Osage County

The pen of Tracy Letts has given us an epic drama in this fine play. As performed at Steppenwolf Theater tonight it was a marvelous vehicle for some very good if not great actors. I especially enjoyed seeing Deanna Dunagan as the matriarch, Violet Weston, give a superb performance. There were others of course, notably Dennis Letts and Amy Morton as her husband and eldest daughter. The program notes were very helpful including a family tree to map the various relationships presented over the evening. This is a long play of three acts, but like all good long plays it got better as the evening went on. The suspense built to the very end when all that we heard was a final murmuring reference to T. S. Eliot, echoing the opening moments of the play.

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About Me

The bookcase of early childhood is a man's companion for life. The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. As for books which were not included in that first bookcase--they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled. - Osip Mandelstam